As Republicans are painfully reminded, progressives thrive on deception. Throw public sector unions into the mix and the worst aspects of Chicago-style cronyism and pay-to-play politics inevitably surface. Add national teachers’ unions, and the potential for a previously unimaginable pay-to-play scam — a scam conservatives might blindly and reflexively support — becomes all too real.

According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the 2011 union membership rate for the public sector was 37.0%. For private sector workers, the rate was 6.9%. Education, training, and library occupations were 36.8% unionized. Particularly in the private sector, union membership is at historic lows, an issue unions have hoped to reverse with the assistance of President Obama.

They have had little success. Card Check, which would eliminate secret ballots in union certification votes, has thus far failed. Mr. Obama has hoped to address this and other labor issues by stacking the National Labor Relations Board with recess appointments of questionable constitutionality, but that maneuver is being fought in the courts and the outcome remains uncertain.

As with gun control, the Obama administration is ever busy at under-the-radar scheming. The most recent attempt to swell education union rolls involves cleverly co-opting some of the rhetoric and philosophy of conservatives — most notably the concept of “accountability.” Fox News reported on a maneuver that could, at least on the surface, have come directly from the conservative playbook:

The proposal by the American Federation of Teachers calls for a nationwide standardized test that would be administered by state-level unions, similar to the way states host bar exams for lawyers.

Union President Randi Weingarten said the proposed competency test is largely in response to young public-school teachers expressing concerns about being unprepared to enter a classroom.”

With George W. Bush’s No Child Left Behind law still in place, so-called “accountability” is still holding sway in the nation’s schools despite rapidly declining revenues available for obscenely expensive high-stakes tests, such as the nearly half-billion dollars Texas is spending for five years worth. All that’s missing from the new proposal is a plea for “fairness”. Ahem:

“It’s not fair to students, and it’s not fair to teachers if they are not prepared on Day One,” [Weingarten] said.

A mandatory standardized test, and federal government mandates to improve “accountability”: what’s not for conservatives to like?

Teachers unions have recently faced increased criticism, particularly from Republican governors, allegedly for demanding high teacher salaries without providing their states with affordable and quality educations.

Though poor-performing tenured teachers are among the biggest concerns, because they are difficult if not impossible to fire, the union proposal does not address that issue.

…

A union task force came up with the test, which its board of directors still must approve before asking states to adopt the concept.

The task force also calls for teachers and educators to set and enforce the standards and said the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards has agreed to get all parties together to design the standards.

It will surprise no one familiar with the Obama administration and progressive tactics to learn:

Education Secretary Arne Duncan is commending the proposal. He says the U.S. shouldn’t tolerate having unprepared teachers.

Their solution to a supposed nationwide crisis of unprepared teachers is a mandatory national exam — like the bar exam — administered by education unions. The fact that bar exams do not weed out incompetent – or even criminal — lawyers aside, this is a solution to a nonexistent problem, and one of the more clever political scams ever hatched.

Highly Qualified Teachers: To be deemed highly qualified, teachers must have: 1) a bachelor’s degree, 2) full state certification or licensure, and 3) prove that they know each subject they teach.

Each state requires these minimum standards, and virtually all also require standardized testing encompassing tests for each discipline a teacher will teach, plus separate tests of general professional standards and skills. All of this is required before a teacher is certified to teach. With the issuance of a teaching certificate, in virtually every state a set of continuing education mandates apply, mandates that must be met in order to continue to teach. Any additional testing layered on these already substantial requirements would simply add much greater costs for no benefit.

No test can achieve what Weingarten wants: perfectly prepared new teachers.

Her test is a red herring. In teaching, as in every other field of human endeavor, only skill and preparation combined with experience — which must be won through actually doing the job over time — can produce competent teachers. Some people will enter the profession with the best intentions, but discover it’s really not for them. Some will have the endowment to be excellent teachers and will shine virtually from their first day in the classroom; others will have varying degrees of lesser success. But no test, particularly no test forced on schools throughout the nation and administered by unions and the federal government, can change human nature and the very nature of how human beings learn and perform any job.

Education unions are the greatest impediment ever devised to true professionalism in teaching. One of the hallmarks of education unionism is ensuring that the worst teachers — even teachers who have committed crimes — cannot be disciplined or fired. As the Fox News article noted, Weingarten’s proposal does not mention or address this indisputable fact. Of what value is an enormously expensive testing program if unfit teachers — whose primary competency is obviously taking tests rather than teaching — can never be fired?

To whatever degree new teachers are unprepared can be addressed — and is addressed by virtually every American school district — by mentoring programs that pair experienced teachers with new teachers. It’s not universally known that no prospective teacher graduates from college without at least a full semester — half a school year — of teaching under the direct supervision of a teacher experienced in teaching new teachers. No test will improve on that experience.

There is no question some new teachers — all of whom are severely limited by being hired from the human race — will not be as ready to teach competently on their first day in the classroom as others. This is true of new plumbers, electricians, scientists, doctors, lawyers, and any other profession. Because human beings are individuals, this will never change, but solid mentoring programs can — and already do — exist. No test ever conceived can accomplish this, or ensure that no poorly qualified people will ever enter the profession. Unions, however, will do their best to ensure they’ll never leave.

This initiative isn’t about teacher quality; it’s about money and power. It’s about federal control and the destruction of federalism. It’s about making education unions the unchallenged gatekeepers of the teaching profession. And above all, it’s an invitation to the kind of corrupt pay-to-play scamming that has long been the foundation of Chicago politics, but writ on a national scale. It’s the ultimate expression of giving the fox the keys to the chicken coop.

Giving unions the ability to determine who is allowed to teach is a necessary — and likely irreversible — first step to universal unionism in American education. Once established, teachers will owe their first allegiance not to their communities, their schools and their students, but to the unions that determine whether they ever enter a classroom and the circumstances under which they remain. Mandatory national curriculums — another initiative currently being pursued by the Obama administration — would be much easier to implement under this scheme. And the best part is the billions upon billions of taxpayer dollars that will be transferred to union coffers to administer this boondoggle, dollars that will in turn be funneled into the campaign funds of progressive politicians with whom the unions will bargain, and the great federal money wheel inexorably grinds on to ensure no democrat will be left behind.

The devious deception and genius of this scam is its usurpation of conservative phraseology. What conservative wouldn’t want teachers to be accountable? Who would argue against well-prepared teachers? Who would argue that it is fair for kids to be taught by poor teachers? Conservatives listening only to the rhetoric of Ms. Weingarten might well be willing to enthusiastically support this scheme.

Stealth unionism, irreversible lifetime employment for incompetent teachers, absolute federal control of local education administered by union bosses: all of this and more may soon be coming to a school near you, courtesy of education union bosses and the Obama administration.

For them, it’s never about the kids.

Mike McDaniel is a former police officer, detective, and SWAT operator, and is now a high school English teacher. He blogs here.

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20 Comments, 16 Threads

1.
Soldier76

Whoa whoa whoa, slow down… are you saying that unions resort to underhanded tactics in order to advance their collectivist ideals? Good piece for sure, but your frequent employment of the “en dash” – like I’m doing right now – is downright maddening. Just scanning over the article visually is difficult. Colons, semi-colons, commas or different sentence structure altogether would help a lot. I’ll step down from my soapbox now.

Mr. McDaniel uses the dash correctly. To use a colon or semicolon for what is called a parenthetical insertion would be incorrect. While a pair of commas could be acceptable, they would tend to be misleading in that they would not clearly indicate the presence of a parenthetical element. Also, the dashes are stylistically superior to the comma. Commas slow the sense of reading, whilst dashes elevate one’s pulse.

If you read my post, at no time did I claim that the en-dash was improperly used, just that its repetitive employment was annoying. I also didn’t suggest that other punctuation could directly replace the aforementioned dash, only that they were options should he decide to restructure his sentences. Your opinion that a comma is inferior to a dash is entirely subjective,, as punctuation is more of a stylistic choice than a definitive law of prose. I think you would have to agree that the use of a dash at every given opportunity is more ridiculous than the occasional comma. Fer crissakes, the mans an English teacher!

Isn’t there something highly unethical about public employee unions financing the election of the very people whose job it is to hire, fire and set the pay and benefits of said public employees?

Isn’t the late great state of California exhibit #1 of a government entity that is owned heart and soul by public employee unions?

Even FDR a socialist of the first rank knew that public employee unions would be the ruin of a nation. We now have the criminal situation of highly overpaid and overpensioned public employees being protected and pampered by politicans from the president of this nation on down.

Enough! Public empolyee unions are nothing less than a pox on this country whose very existence spells fiscal peril.

Why would anyone tolerate the very idea of teachers, firemen, policemen, and other public servants being able to strike against the very people they were hired to educate, protect or serve?

Isn’t it way past time to outlaw public employee unions?

The use of the RICO Act to rein in pensions given to currently retired “public servants” might also be a good idea!

Unions are generally little more than criminal enterprises, headed by Mafia-like Dons. And the teacher’s union is one of the most thoroughly corrupt and dangerous too.

Why? Because they control generations of kiddies and their mischief making – of the radical left/Islamist kind – is beyond dispute. And every now and again they run con games dressed up in different verbiage, but no less con worthy.

And the damage incurred by many private schools (through various union pressures too) is EXPONENTIALLY worse in public schools, all ‘credit’ to the teacher’s union; a crew so deeply embedded with revolutionaries in Washington it is impossible to separate one from the other. Incestuous twins.

It’s not a test. It’s a performance assessment which means behavioral, not mental. Performance assessment, which is also what most of the Common Core measurements are (think projects and tasks not knowledge of facts), is a misleading term designed to mask how little knowledge there is. It also allows credentialling if you are willing and have the right attitudes to be a social Change Agent even if if you are weak in the knowledge department and what is euphemistically called a dim bulb.

The AFT and the NEA have come up with a different definition of what constitutes Effective Teaching and the teachers evals and the softening of tenure are all tied into forcing the teachers to comply with the model. To not close the door this time and teach the content as happened with the 60s and 90s attempts at radical ed reform (which is what the insiders themselves call it). The whole point is to have an affective dialogue with the students that will change their values, attitudes, and beliefs and provoke them to engage in action to change the world’s problems. Without little impediments like knowledge of what created the tragic social engineering disasters of the past.

Think of what the AFT and NEA and CCSSO are all doing as behavioral compliance measures. Against teachers and students. Ultimately tied to changing the nature of the American economy and our political structure. You simply create false beliefs about the nature of the US political system in enough people and the actual structure of the Constitution ceases to matter.

That’s the theory anyway. And this ed model is all about getting political theories implemented in the classroom.

That’s what research-based means now in education. Implementing theories in the classroom. On our dime.

This may be one issue I may agree with PJmedia. The teachers union are an abysmal failure to our children. When parents are more involved in their schools, their children do well. They vet their schools, teachers and administrators better.

The test proposal is cartel behavior because it applies only to prospective teachers; those already teaching are exempt. If the purpose of the proposed test were to ensure high qualifications among teachers, it would apply to current teachers, too. But, that would inevitably mean that some current teachers couldn’t pass the test and so would lose their jobs. Imagine how long a teacher union president would keep her own job if she got some of her constituents fired, no matter how incompetent they were. It’s interesting that the AFT calls the proposed test a “bar exam”, since the legal profession is the country’s most tyrannical cartel. Recently, the Chief Justice of the Court of Appeals of New York instituted a requirement that to obtain a law license, prospective lawyers must perform fifty hours of free legal work. Those who already hold law licenses are exempt. The ostensible reason for the requirement is to provide legal services for people who can’t afford lawyers, but if that were true why does the requirement apply only to those attempting to become lawyers and omit those who already are? Wouldn’t charity clients be better served by more experienced lawyers instead of beginners? The purpose of the free service requirement, like the “bar exam” for prospective teachers, isn’t protection of school children or poor litigants, it’s job protection for incumbents.

Jack-current teachers are not exempt. As I wrote that was the purpose of pushing new teacher evals and loosening tenure. It’s not the mediocre teachers at risk it is the noncompliant ones. Teachers also get pulled into compliance with a poorly understood concept called the Learning Community where they must go along with herd and the group demands or find another profession.

I am actually a lawyer and know what a real profession is. Real professions focus on the individual’s knowledge and skills, not fealty to political theories and willingness to take desired actions or desired dispositions for radical Transformation. There’s a point in that AFT report where it talks of need to “establish a conceptual framework around which to weave course learning and clinical experiences, avoiding fragmentation and encouraging internalization and application.”

That sounds like a catechism of faith because that is what they are talking about. Professions do not create conceptual belief systems to organize your actions around. Trying to make sure no one has a will or pathway of their own. I’m a good lawyer because I can see things no one had to explain to me. This is an image of teachers faithfully adhering to established doctrine. The antithesis of a profession. But very using for politicizing and psychologizing the classroom to turn students into compliant social change agents as well.

Which is absolutely the intent. And then turn into an electoral coalition as these students begin to vote.

Robin, I have read the AFT proposal, available on its own website, and I don’t see anywhere it recommends that the proposed test apply to incumbent teachers and not just prospective teachers. Since you have said that the AFT would apply the test to current teachers, can you show me where the AFT’s report or its press release says that?

Republicans created this ‘marriage of hell and hell’ when they decided to join forces with the libs to cash in on the very lucrative education business.

A ‘bipartisan’ association ensued and now the Repubs are caught in the vice grip of Marxists like Ayers, Duncan and Obama.

Deception? You betcha and as Lenin said the capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them. St. Ignatius said ‘hell is missing the point’ and boy have conservatives and Repubs missed the point of what the Left was up to. They’re still railing against the unions which includes hard working rank and file teachers instead of the real communists heading up this whole deceit-Michelle Rhee, Bill Ayers and the rest of the revolutionaries.

I often wonder if it would change any american minds if they would look up the term ‘euro communism’, and would give everyone a better understanding of the the modern day progressive movement. Power for public employee unions along with mainstreaming the gay and feminist agenda was the primary objective of euro communism. Basically this is the modern democrat party platform also.

In reality, such a system would only formalize what happens already. A college “diploma” is no more today than a certificate of attendance; as long as you get along, go along, show up and pay, you become “educated,” or at least credentialled. In much of the Country the aspiring teacher must work for some time as a “teacher’s aide” to establish whether s/he “fits in.” If one fits in as a teacher’s aide, one is invited to become a teacher. The new teacher gets a little bit of supervision and observation for the next two to five years, depending on the jurisdiction, before tenure is conferred. If the aspiring teacher doesn’t fit in, s/he is not retained and it is almost unheard of that a teachers’ union would contest the non-retention of a non-tenured teacher. Once tenure is conferred, the total supervision of a teacher is some pro forma visits to the classroom by a Teacher in Charge or a Principal and that’s it. The only thing a teacher can do to get disciplined or dismissed is commit a politically incorrect crime. That isn’t because they can’t be fired, even in the union states, but because they won’t be fired; everybody in management was vetted by the union, everybody on the Board was endorsed by the union – nobody wants to fire a teacher who’s been accepted by the group.

The Detroit metropolitan area has the highest average public school teacher pay among metropolitan areas with an average of $71,000 Salaries.
According to the Department of Education , of the Detroit public-school system eighth graders only 7 % scored highly enough on the department’s National Assessment of Educational Progress test in 2011 to be rated “proficient” or better in reading, only 4 % scored highly enough to be rated “proficient” or better in math.

The Chicago school teachers earned an average of $68,0000 .Students have a reported 64% graduation rate with 51% of high school graduates rated “proficient” in reading.

Common Core State Standards in English is a program already adopted by 46 states and the District of Columbia. It calls for an increase in the reading of “informational text” instead of fictional literature. When the new standards are fully implemented in 2014, nonfiction texts will comprise 50 percent of reading assignments in elementary schools, with a required increase to 70 percent by grade 12. Thus, timeless literature such as Of Mice and Men, or Catcher in the Rye will be replaced by recommended nonfiction works such as “Executive Order 13423: Strengthening Federal Environmental, Energy, and Transportation Management,” or “Recommended Levels of Insulation by the the US Environmental Protection Agency.”

Proponents of Common Core, including the National Governors Association and the Council of Chief State School Officers, claim U.S. students have grown used to easy reading assignments that leave them unprepared to comprehend complex nonfiction. This leaves too many students unprepared for the rigors of college and the demands of the workplace, experts say. And while some of the recommended texts are legitimate, such as Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America,” those mentioned in the first paragraph, or a New Yorker essay titled “The Cost Conundrum,” which would give students the impression that the Affordable Healthcare Act is good policy, are little more than thinly-veiled efforts to promote a progressive agenda masquerading as education.

Four decades ago, most of the children S.S.I. covered had severe physical handicaps or mental retardation that made it difficult for parents to hold jobs — about 1 % of all poor children. But now 55 % of the disabilities it covers are fuzzy intellectual disabilities, where the diagnosis isn’t clear-cut. More than 1.2 million children across America — 9 % of all low-income children — are now enrolled in S.S.I. as disabled, at an annual cost of more than $9 billion.

Not to mention the muslim infiltration in TX schools that revised American History to teach the Boston Tea Party was terrorism and the pilgrims were racists that scalped Indians .